Most of the time.
The City Paper is starting to look into homicides to see what actually happens in the Hall of Justice. Sometimes somebody gets put away. Most of the times, not.
I was turned onto this by the unfortunately fascinating Baltimore Crime Blog.
A 10AM robbery of an armored truck pulled up at Lexington Market is bold, to say the least. Here’s the Sun’s account. Makes me think of the line from the Godfather, at least as I remember it: “Forget the gun, grab the crabcake!”
This came to me today:
I came across your book at baltimorecrime.blogspot.com, so far I am 50 pages in to it and I have to say that you have an excellent way of speaking the truth. I am a Baltimore police officer […] and I have a B.S. in Criminal Justice from […] (I am debating whether or not to attend Grad School). Thus far, from both my personal experience and academic background everything that you have written seems to be spot on. As I get further into the book, I will keep you posted.
If you are planning on lecturing anywhere in the greater Baltimore-Philly-D.C. area please let me know, I would like to attend.
I’m sure at some point I’ll be speaking in Baltimore. No plans yet, though. I’ll keep you posted.
I got a call from Laura Vozzella of the Baltimore Sunthe other day.
I thought maybe she was a reviewer asking about a press release from Princeton Press telling reviewers to hold off until the new edition is out.
But I got worried when I started talking about the errors and heard the tapity-tap-type of note taking in the background.
It’s certainly not like the Sunhas been particularly good to me. Yes, they’ve published two op-eds of mine. But since then, I’ve been misquotedin the Sun. They hadn’t (yet) mentioned my work or book. They generally don’t call me about Baltimore police issues (they always call Eugene O’Donnell, one of my esteemed colleagues. Gene is a great guy, knowledgeable and smart, but hewasn’t a Baltimore cop!). And yet for some reason, unlike every other cop I worked with, I don’t hate the Sun.
Cops hate newspapers with even more venom than they hate Hillary Clinton. Reporters screw up crime stories. Or break scandals that shouldn’t be. Or insist on getting “both” sides of the story when there is only one side.
Sometimes, the truth is exactly like the cops say. Say a thieving, violent, robbing, drug-dealing young thug goes on a rampage, pulls a gun on cops, and gets killed. Nothing is worse than quoting her mother insisting that her baby never did nothing wrong and was just killed by police in cold blood while coming back from volunteer work at the HIV orphanage. Readers are left to assume that the truth lies somewhere in between the two versions. That’s not right, fair, or true.
Probably half of all police stories show cops in a negative light. A reader may be left to assume that half of everything police do is bad. Of course this isn’t the case. But police need to understand that newspapers will never write column after column of “Another cop goes to work, does a damn good job, and comes home safely.”
No matter, I like newspapers. I like reporters. Maybe it’s because there’s a bit of journalism in my blood. I loved writing for and editing my high-school newspaper, the Evanstonian. And my uncle was a big-shot editor-in-chief for many fine papers.
So Ms. Vozzella is typing away and I’m telling her everything that’s bad about my book. What can you do? All publicity is good publicity, they say… as long as they spell your name right. Well Laura not only spelled my name right, but she wrote a damn good column:
First, don’t kill all the editors
by Laura Vozzell
May 2, 2008First, Princeton University Press issued the book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. Then it issued the news release recalling the book.
“Turns out I wasn’t a cop at all, and I made it all up,” joked Peter Moskos, the author and an assistant professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Moskos really was a city officer from Dec. 6, 1999, to April 1, 2002, Baltimore police spokesman Sterling Clifford confirmed. (Clifford wasn’t otherwise vouching for the book, which he hadn’t read. “It’s not like the CIA where even if you’re gone, if you write something about it, they have to approve it,” Clifford said. “We’re stuck with what they write.”)
The real reason the book has been pulled off shelves, according to Moskos and Princeton: more than 90 grammar and spelling mistakes. After the book was issued two weeks ago, Moskos’ mother and friends spotted what copy editors at the esteemed publisher apparently overlooked.
“A lot of errors for a 200-page book,” said Moskos, who quipped that he should not have gone with a “fly-by-night organization” like Princeton. “The director of the press called it ‘unprecedented.’”
Said Princeton publicist Lisa Fortunato: “For us, this is very unusual.”
Don’t those Ivy League-types have Spellcheck?
“You know what? We asked the same question,” Fortunato said. “I don’t know the full story.”
The book is expected to be back on shelves in four to five weeks. Not a huge delay, but one that’s upsetting to Moskos, since he has already begun promoting the book.
“It’s just frustrating because I was on the radio today, and you can’t buy it this instant on Amazon,” he said.
At least he has a sense of humor about some of the errors.
“Somewhere in the book, ‘Baltimore’ is spelled wrong,” Moskos said. “Maybe I spelled it with a ‘d’ like it’s said.”
Ironically, there is an error in the column.
My date of hire was indeed Dec 6, 1999 (The day before the day that will live in infamy is how I remembered it–and since this date goes on a lot of police forms, I needed to remember it). But I entered the academy on Oct 29, 1999.
My end date, however, was neither April 1 nor 2002. I turned in my paperson April Fool’s Day (seemed kind of funny to me at the time). But my last night in uniform was June 25. And (because of backed up sick/vacation/personal days) I got paid until early July, when my employment officially ended. And it was 2001.
So in my mind, I worked from Oct 1999 to June 2001. In the police department records, I should be listed as having worked from Dec 1999, to July 2001.
Initially my presence was greeted with skepticism, especially from supervisors who believed, probably accurately, that nothing good could come from my writing. One lieutenant told me: “Moskos, I like you. But I don’t want anything to do with your book. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want my name in it. I don’t want any part of it.” Outside of this reference, he’s not.
That quote is from Cop in the Hood. That very lieutenant (if my memory is correct) sent me the following email:
Moskos,
I hope you are doing well.
You were always a genuine “good guy” and always listening and learning.
Can’t wait to get the book.
It isn’t like it used to be around here. You would probably only know a handful of people at the Eastern.
Good Luck, …………
Those are very kind words. Of course any two-bit grad student can listen and learn, it’s the actual “doing” that makes you real police.
I received a follow-up email on 28 April:
Yes, I believe it was I the one who said don’t put me or my name in your book. That’s OK.
The small portion I read online looks great! It should be mandatory reading for all high school seniors to give them a taste of reality not seen on MTV’s “real world”.
So how’s life as a professor? I hope things are going well for you. I bet some of your students can’t believe some of the stories you can tell them about inner city life.
I think the experience you’ve had will be nothing but good for your career, and life in general.
You’ve had the chance to see things 95% of society doesn’t know exist.
With any luck all of your students will become right wing conservatives!
It’s horrible anytime a police officer dies. It’s particularly horrible when it’s at the hands of another police officer.
If the Baltimore Sun is correct, the officer who died had 44 years on. I didn’t know any officer had 44 years on.
My condolences to the officer’s family.
This is from the Economist:
Thursday
I’M STANDING on a street lined with boarded-up shops—a popular haven for drug-dealers. A police officer is frisking a suspect whose trousers are nearly around his knees. The policeman didn’t pull them down; that’s how the suspect wears them. A bit impractical, perhaps, if his line of work requires him to run away from policemen.
But he insists that he is no longer in that line of work. He was caught once, but is now going straight. He has a legitimate reason for hanging around a nearly deserted street, after dark, in the pouring rain, for several hours. He is waiting for someone, he says.
AFP Follow the trousersThe police officer’s colossal partner, whose sense of humour is as robust as his shoulders, prays aloud: “Oh Lord, I pray that a meteorite hits this [drug bazaar].” (He adds a P.S. to the effect that God should be careful not to hurt anyone.)
The temporal authorities in Baltimore take a more pragmatic approach to fighting crime. Like every other large city, they have copied elements of New York’s system for mapping crime statistics, which allows police departments to send officers where they are most needed.
Baltimore has also put more officers on foot patrol, so that they are closer to the people they are supposed to protect. It has locked up many of the most violent offenders. And it has encouraged local volunteers to mediate between young hot-heads. Such volunteers know when a fight is about to erupt over, for example, a stolen girlfriend. All this is quite new, but the mayor, Sheila Dixon, thinks it is working. The murder rate for the first three months of this year was sharply lower than last year.
But still, the drug trade is unlikely to be peaceful so long as it is illegal. Crack pushers cannot ask the courts to settle their disputes. The only way to stop them shooting each other is to legalise drugs, reckons Peter Moskos, a sociologist who spent a year as a policeman in Baltimore’s eastern district and wrote a book about it.
That is not going to happen, alas. And even if it did, it would hardly be a panacea. Anyone with a proper job leaves the ghetto. The young men left behind develop traits that render them unemployable. For example, says Mr Moskos, they react violently to trivial slights. This is a useful quality in a drug-dealer, but less so in most other trades.
Wild gun battles in Baltimore are unfortunately nothing new. But this time an officer almost died.
One of my fears is that my book won’t be well received by my cop friends in Baltimore.
I’m proud of the book. And I think it’s pro-police because it shows the shit we had to deal with. Good workers in a bad system. But I’m always been afraid that cops wouldn’t like it because it’s not 100% pro-police. I don’t want to be tarred and feathered next time I go to Baltimore.
But the initial reports from Charm City’s Finest are favorable.
One of my academy classmates said he liked the academy chapter and wrote me a good story I’d forgotten:
I don’t know if you remember, but one day we were getting ready to take a test, and [____] stood up and said, “Sir, you can’t give us the test yet. We have not been spoon fed the answers yet.”
He never knew when to shut up.
There’s a lot of pathos in this video. And a hell of a Baltimore accent.
A visit to Maryland’s supermax. And quite an indictment of the criminal justice system.
